C Hribal - The Company Car

Said our mother, still giddy, “Wally-Bear, I’m ready for anything.”

Of course it wasn’t going to last. Nothing does. A weekend is not a life, after all, and squeezing from a weekend every possible moment for romance, mystery, and happiness only confirms its exquisite finiteness. They returned to Chicago, returned the borrowed car, and headed out for San Diego in a new Buick Roadmaster, a drive-away vehicle that our father had contracted to deliver to a doctor in L.A.

It is perhaps fitting that our father didn’t even own the car he and our mother drove out to San Diego. He sold his interest in the Terraplane to Ernie Klapatek, and the next car he owned outright was the one he got after he retired.

The plan was for them to continue their honeymoon on the drive out, then our father would drop our mother off in San Diego and he’d motor up to L.A. alone and take the bus back, reporting for active duty just hours before he was due. They took Route 66 most of the way, following the song’s route except for when they dipped into Mexico for twenty-four hours of international nooky.

While it’s widely believed in our family that Sarah, the oldest, was a consolation baby, the product of our mother and father administering solace to each other for not scoring the TV dowry, Sarah herself maintains she was conceived a day or so later, fully within wedlock, either in the woods ringing the shores of Lake Mendota or during one of those festive rest stops, perhaps even—she’ll waggle her eyebrows at the romance of this—in another country entirely. We don’t believe her because our mother already knew she was pregnant while they were driving across the Southwest. Fast-acting hormones, according to our mother. She says she must have thrown up on every cactus from New Mexico to Arizona.

Some of the rest stops were more festive than others. At the Arizona-California border, the guards took one look at our father—a geeky-looking guy with lampblack eyes and scoops of hair already missing from his forehead—and another at our mother—a curvaceous brunette with the lips of Betty Grable and the eyes of Lauren Bacall—and they knew what they had were a couple of newlyweds. They recognized the look of a newly married woman when they saw one. A woman dazed with sex, which wasn’t quite the case—she was dazed with pregnancy, but you couldn’t expect these border guards to know that. They ordered our parents out of the car, asked them to please open their suitcases. When our father protested, he was told they were looking for contraband fruit from either Texas or Mexico. They had to search everything. And though they said they were sorry, they certainly didn’t appear to be. Our father’s suitcases received a cursory glance. Our mother’s ended up all over the highway. Her entire trousseau was scattered across the car’s hood and over the roof and trunk, her unmentionables toyed with, then dropped. Our mother went scarlet as the guard in charge held each item up for his compatriots, one after another, then passed it on. Each guard pinched each new item between his fingers like he was holding up a skunk, only his grin showed he knew better. “And what have we here?” and “What’s this?” the head guard kept saying as he examined slips, half-slips, teddies, tap pants, stockings, garters, nightgowns, negligees, bras, panties, silk stockings, camisoles. You name it, they held it up to the stark Arizona sun, then let it trail away from their fingers in the hot Arizona breeze. “What are you doing?” our mother screamed.

“Checking for fruit,” they replied. “You can’t take fruit across state lines.”

Four years later, driving back with two squalling kids in the backseat, our mother got even. Besides Sarah, she’d had Robert Aaron, another leave baby, and I was clearly on the way. I was a welcome-back-to-the-States baby, conceived on their fourth wedding anniversary. Besides the two squalling kids, who were turning a high pink no matter how much flesh our mother tried to keep covered—she had put diapers on their arms, pinned to the sleeves of their blouses, and tied bonnets onto their heads—our mother had a load of fruit with her. Three pineapples, a sack of oranges, and bunches and bunches of bananas—big stalks of them—were piled in the front seat and between her legs. Just to see, our mother said. Just to see.

She got the same border guard, puffier now, but unmistakably him. He took one look at Sarah and Robert, sunburnt and screaming in the backseat, another at our mother, still pretty but obviously far gone into motherhood, and waved us through.

Dorie looks up from the Bicycling magazine she’s been paging through. “Good story, Em, but still I wonder, What was it like for your mom? I mean, when they were first married. It wasn’t like now, where you have options. I mean, she was just along for the ride, wasn’t she?”

I don’t answer. Dorie’s planning her big bike trip for the summer, twelve hundred miles, Milwaukee to Connecticut. She has a tune-up trip before—a lap around Lake Michigan—but that’s with her cycling club, the Acoustic Cyclers of Greater Milwaukee. Her Darien trek, though, is her first solo. Just her, her panniers stuffed with gear, and a Visa card. “It’s all about testing limits,” she tells me when I ask. “Besides,” she says, touching my chest in a rare display of affection, “who’s going to hold down the fort?”

Fort holding is my job. I knew this even before we married. When we were first dating, it was clear that her appetite for doing, getting, and going was far greater than mine. Perhaps my most exotic desire was wanting Dorie in the first place. A complicated story, but the short version is that, after a very tumultuous period in her life, Dorie wanted to settle down. And strangely enough, she wanted to settle down with me.

She was a single mom when we met, but comfortably well-off. Had her own business buying and selling farms in the town where we both grew up, then gave it up soon after the boom hit and moved to Milwaukee. Bought a funky old house in a funky old neighborhood—Victorians mostly—and got interested in rehab. A lot of the houses had been carved up into rooming houses, there were prostitutes on the corners and drugs in the alleys—the old urban decay story—and Dorie, God bless her, saw the possibilities of turning Veedon Park into a neighborhood again. Some gay couples and other single moms started buying properties from the slumlords and turning them into places people actually wanted to live in. We met when she came by my apartment on the third floor of a Queen Anne that had seen better days to inform me that she was now my landlord, and if I had any problems, to please come see her, she was living in the Arts and Crafts home down the street—the one with the porch roof propped up with I-beams while the porch itself was being rebricked.

I was managing a used bookstore then. An English lit Ph.D. in a glutted market, I went with Plan B, which was not so much a plan as it was a series of lucky accidents, the culmination of which was having Dorie Keillor as my landlord. Over beers and brats at a neighborhood potluck, we got to talking. Catching up, actually. I had known her since I was ten, had a crush on her for years, then lost track of her when she was seventeen and she dropped out of school.

“I remember you were pretty wild in high school,” I said. “At least for Augsbury.”

“Yeah, and you were a straight arrow and boring. At least for Augsbury.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad we got that out of the way.”

She had her son with her, a three-year-old kid with a mass of curly black hair (I could see that was where he got his name, Woolie). He was trying to get his mouth around a bratwurst. Ketchup was dribbling onto his lap.